The son of a police officer has opened fire with her former service weapon at Florida State University (FSU), killing two people and injuring six others, authorities say.
The alleged gunman, 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner, began shooting at around lunchtime near the student union building in the state capital of Tallahassee.
The suspect was shot by police and taken to hospital. The motive is unclear. The deceased were not students, campus police said, but their identities have not been released.
The suspect is the son of a veteran Leon County police officer who is a model employee, said Sheriff Walt McNeil. Jessica Ikner, a school resource officer, kept the gun after the force upgraded its weapons.
A shotgun was also found at the scene, police said. The gunman is believed to be a FSU student, according to investigators.
He was a “longstanding member” of the sheriff office’s youth advisory council and was engaged in a number of training programmes, Sheriff McNeil said.
“So it is not a surprise that he had access to weapons,” he said.
The suspect was a protester at a campus demonstration against President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to the student newspaper.
His quote to FSUNews.com was removed on Thursday with an editors note saying the outlet did not wish to amplify the suspect’s voice.
Police responded to an active shooter call at around midday local time, the university said. An alert was issued warning students and those on campus to “seek shelter and await further instructions”.
“One of my classmates got an alert on her phone and announced it to the rest of the class,” student Ava Arenado told CBS News Miami.
Another student, Blake Leonard, told CBS he initially heard roughly 12 shots fired.
“In my head, I thought it was construction at first, until I looked behind me and saw people running from the union towards my direction, and then I heard another 12 or 15 shots go off, so I started running away from there too,” he said.
President Donald Trump, who said he was briefed on the incident before meeting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the White House, was asked whether he wanted to change gun regulations in light of the shooting.
He said he was a “big advocate” of the Second Amendment in the US Constitution, which protects gun rights.
“I have been since the beginning,” he said. “I have protected it. These things are terrible. We will have more to say about it later.”
He called the shooting “a shame, a horrible thing”.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said: “Our prayers are with our FSU family and state law enforcement is actively responding.”
This is not the first shooting at FSU. In 2015, a graduate of the school shot and injured three people at the library before he was fatally shot by police.
The father of a girl who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida said some of her classmates who were lucky enough to survive that attack were on the campus at FSU during Thursday’s assault.
Fred Guttenberg, a gun control advocate, wrote on X: “Incredibly, some of them were just a part of their 2nd school shooting and some were in the student union today.”
Source: BBC
--Agencies
